Goodell, NFL Get Exactly What They Want

Usually about this time of year, about all NFL fans have to look forward to is passing camp coverage. Then, in a month or so, there would be a mandatory minicamp worth a couple days of coverage.

Today, the NFL Network will present (at least) 12 hours of coverage of deflategate and the Tom Brady suspension.

People are talking about the NFL. In May.

In fact, it’s the number one story in the country right now. The majority of people in the country think that the NFL got it right, finally nailing that cheater Tom Brady and his team, the New England Patriots. Roger Goodell is being lauded in the New York tabloids and elsewhere.

Worthless columnists like Bob Kravitz are feeling their oats and getting their licks in. The whole country is enjoying a measure of comeuppance.[pullquote]Do the Patriots push the boundaries? Of course they do. Is what they do worthy of the reaction it causes? Not if you look at the precedents in the league. Things don’t become a big deal until the Patriots do them.[/pullquote]

Now, the NFL has its entire offseason mapped out, and will remain in the headlines. Brady’s appeal. Then inevitable action after the appeal. Possible legal action from Robert Kraft, strategically placed leaks from the NFL offices, the anticipation of what is going to happen opening night – will Goodell be there? Will the Patriots raise their banner without Brady? Will Patriots fans even show up?

Make no mistake, deflategate is a boon for the NFL. They’re loving it.

The Patriots are the only NFL team they could get away with doing this to. Why? Because they might be the only entity in the league hated more than Goodell.

The same people who mocked the Mueller Report when it came out (and by the way, Goodell never gave up a personal cell phone in that investigation either) are viewing the Wells Report as Gospel.

The NFL can’t keep its stories or policies straight, but the majority of people don’t care, because the Patriots got nailed.

The NFL and sports media are perfect for each other. Both are full of corrupt, hypocritical carnival barkers who only care about their own agendas, which usually consist of attention being brought on themselves.

Barflys like Dan Shaughnessy accuse the Patriots and their fans of being paranoid and thinking that everyone is out to get them. It’s not paranoia if it is true.

The Patriots have pissed people off because they win too much and their coach isn’t friendly to the media. The two parties are complicit.

That is what this entire thing boils down to.

Other league executives are tired of being taken to the woodshed by the Patriots, so they leak information to the media, most of whom are only too glad to have something to “get back” at that meanie, Belichick with. This causes this firestorm as media figure after media figure try to top each other in condemning the Patriots.

Do the Patriots push the boundaries? Of course they do. Is what they do worthy of the reaction it causes? Not if you look at the precedents in the league. Things don’t become a big deal until the Patriots do them.

Did the league care about PSI before January? Apparently not. teams get caught messing with balls in the middle of the game and they get a warning. Aaron Rodgers tells CBS that he likes to get the balls overinflated and sneak them past the officials. The Wells Report indicates that Walt Anderson was one of the few officials who regularly check the footballs, and yet the league made sure to remind him again to do so. And he still didn’t write down the measurements or keep track of the footballs.

That 32 game standard apparently doesn’t apply to teams, as Troy Vincent specifically mentioned Spygate as a reason for severity of the Patriots punishment yesterday.

Spygate was eight years ago.

Vincent also cited the Patriots lack of cooperation in the investigation as reason for the harsh penalty.

A look at page 23 of the Wells Report will find this line: “the Patriots provided substantial cooperation throughout the investigation.”

Who are the driving forces behind all of this? The Colts, who have been getting their asses handed to them by the Patriots. Indianapolis columnists Kravitz and Gregg Doyel. The Ravens who were embarrassed by a then-legal formation and called out on it by Brady, Mike Kensil, a former Jets executive with a well-established grudge against the Patriots. The investigation was led by NFL EVP Jeffrey Pash, who took shots at the Patriots when the Broncos had their version of Spygate, and by Ted Wells, who has now shown that he’ll bring the goods home for the NFL in his independent investigations. Helping him on the investigation were lawyers from the same firm who represented the NFL in its concussion lawsuit.

On NFL Network and its wall-to-wall coverage you’ve got Marshall Faulk and Kurt Warner crowing over the penalties, both have well known grudges with the Patriots. You’ve got Charley Casserly claiming the Patriots got off easy. Casserly and Belichick have a well-known hate feud as well. (Go ask Charley Casserly, he’s got all the answers.) Hipster Mike Silver, he of of the “growing disconnect” between Brady and the Patriots loves to get his voice heard.

Media everywhere, who don’t like how Belichick operates are only too glad to pile on.

Make no mistake, the NFL loves this attention. NFL Network is buzzing with deflategate talk. Sports talk radio across the country is talking about the league. Columnists everywhere are writing about it.

The NFL has exactly what they want. People talking about the league during what is normally the deadest time of the year.

And they’re not talking about domestic violence or child abuse. They’re talking about PSI.

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Published by Bruce Allen

89 thoughts on “Goodell, NFL Get Exactly What They Want”

The takeaway here is that the NFL has set a precedent for itself in this ruling. Now, ‘probable cause’ rather than ‘proof’ will be enough to penalize a team or player. And no team or player will be able to successfully argue the point now that the NFL has set the ‘burden of proof’ this low.

I don’t mean to quibble but they set the probable cause standard with bounty gate. Tom Benson is still pissed that Sean Payton was suspended for a year because “he should have known”. As Mike Reiss said yesterday, there is a reason the NFL’s track record in court is so bad…

And let’s not forget that when the situation was given to Tagliabue as a neutral arbitrator (which, actually, he probably was at that point)… he basically threw out about 75% of the “investigation” that the league had spent months on as unpersuasive and incomplete.

This is a Tour de Force Bruce. Well done. I couldn’t have said it better myself because my rant would be filled with far too many f-bombs and other expletives. You kept it clean and delivered the goods.

Bruce, a fine and concise coumn. I’ve probably read and listened to too much on this subject but there is one thing I’ve not heard a comment on and maybe I’m being too simplistic. If the pregame readings for the Patriots was at 12.5 and the Colts were at 13.5 (I’m making an assumption here but we’ll never know because they didn’t record them) then Indy balls would have to be higher at halftime by default. Is it more likely than not that the Indy balls recorded higher at halftime because they started higher? Am I missing something here?

The starting PSI being higher was one reason. The other factor is that it appears Indy’s footballs were measured after the Patriots footballs at halftime. Given that cold footballs re-inflate, at least somewhat, once they’re put back inside a warm locker room, at halftime those Indy balls would have had a chance to “regain” some of the PSI they lost while waiting for the officials to gauge them. The fact that they “only had enough time” to gauge 4 Indy footballs, while gauging 11 Patriots balls is another huge flaw in the report — the control groups are not comparable. The entire thing is a complete farce, and any fair-thinking person knows it. (Alas, as Bruce said, fair-thinking people, when it comes to the media and the other 31 fan bases, are few and far between.)

I know. It’s completely insane. I LOL’d at the report trying to nail McNally because he called the toilet in the hallway bathroom a “urinal”. Unreal. If anything, that proves he didn’t make disappearing into that bathroom with the footballs right before kickoff a weekly habit, because if he had, he’d be more familiar with that restroom and he’d be 100% sure to say that the restroom contained a toilet and not a urinal. Inconsequential minutia like that is what the NFL is trying to use to hang one of its greatest-ever players and to sabotage the next two college draft classes of its most high-profile franchise. We live in freakin’
Wonderland — I half expect to look over my shoulder and see Alice and the Mad Hatter staring back at me.

I think they have one over @ SoSH, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to point out the folks doing actual good work across various mediums:
@jerrythorton1, @michaelFhurley, @chatham58, Curran, Zolack. I am sure that many are missing.

I’m at the point that this group and the ones LTD listed are all I can handle. There is a certain glee in the voices and written words of so many of the local media. None of them can seem to admit that what should have happened was a quick memo to teams that the league was monitoring PSI. Instead, it’s Kraft’s fault because it was all him that put Goodell in place.

I made the mistake of turning on F&M as soon as I saw the news break on Twitter. It was after 5 pm and I was driving home. The discussion was infuriating before, but it hit a level of incompetence and mind-numbing conspiracy theory yesterday that I didn’t know was possible. Did you guys know that given the severity of the punishment, it’s obvious that Wells and his investigative team found all sorts of nasty, nefarious rule-breaking evidence on Bill Belichick and negotiated to have it taken out of the report? We know this because it’s not in the report. Yes, that was their hypothesis. If you don’t see it, then it must be true. That is now the jumping off point for discussing #DeflateGate.

Coincidentally, my car overheated and broke down several minutes later. I had to be towed to my mechanic grumbling to myself the whole ride.

Absolutely spot-on Bruce. Listening to talk radio out here in Denver, its almost like Christmas morning. All they can talk about is the AFC championship game being played now in Denver instead of New England. They are mostly downplaying the deflation angle, actually one of the hosts mentioning that Peyton probably does something like that too.

Single most astute observation I have seen made regarding deflate gate. I don’t think there is a responsible adult in the room who will stand up and call this the farce that it is. Tom Curran has started asking the next logical question…when will the NFL look at their own standards and policies and see why they were not followed in this case:

The thing missing in this entire fiasco has been perspective. I keep waiting for someone to have some. It now looks like we are going to need a Federal judge to do it. That is another ridiculous in the long line of ridiculousness this investigation as produced.

And also no one’s talking about concussions, which is a legitimate threat to the future of the sport – and frankly more of the league’s responsibility than the felonious behavior of its players. And the NFL has long been implementing policies to encourage parity, to which the Patriots have been immune for the past decade. So taking the draft picks could help accelerate the Patriots’ impending fall, which the media has been predicting for years.

Goodell is following the despot handbook. People grumbling about your leadership? Want to consolidate power? Point the finger elsewhere – it’s the Jews, it’s the rich peasants, it’s the intelligentsia, it’s the communists. Logic doesn’t matter – what matters is stirring up the mob to hide your own deficiencies.

The article in the NYT that ran back in January detailing how the Giants’ equipment staff basically destroys Eli Manning’s footballs for about a full six months before the season was pretty telling. He likes them to feel “like they’re ten years old,” was the money quote. So that’s OK but being .03 PSI slightly under some arbitrary floor is a crime against football humanity the likes of which we haven’t seen since, well, since “Spygate” (right, haters?). The mind boggles.
hat kills me is how the Colts ALWAYS seem to come out clean whenever something like this happens. They pumped in fake crowd noise for years (we all know they did this, denials be damned); they utilized their former GM’s and former coach’s influence on the Competition Committee to specifically target the Patriots with a rules “emphasis” (weasel wording to get around the fact that rules changes have to be approved by the entire league, not just the CC); they deliberately tanked an entire season, defrauding their season ticket holders as well as influencing playoff spots so that they could draft the next great franchise QB after their last great franchise QB had become a very expensive injury case; their owner endangered lives by driving high on every controlled substance under the sun and basically got a minor suspension, and the story quickly faded from the headlines; and they — Ideal Gas Law or not — played with at least three underinflated footballs in the AFC title game, yet received no scrutiny or criticism. Why is that franchise — the one that left its old city under cover of darkness in one of the most despicable acts in league history — always immune to criticism?

“But with Deflategate nearing its end, it should be enough to make even the most diehard Pats fans give up the notion that the Patriots are somehow special in the eyes of the football gods, due to the way in which they conduct their affairs.”

*************************************

The “Patriot Way” is 100% a creation and topic spoken of only by members of the media.

I have never been in the presence of a single fan that talked about the “Patriot Way”. We’ve argued about Brady being the GOAT, we’ve talked about Belichick being a football genius, we made of John Madden saying they should play for overtime, at all of the Super Bowl parties, all of the normal game-day Sundays, no one has ever said anything about the “Patriot Way”.

Saw someone post this in response: “He’s right. The science won’t change, THE NUMBERS WILL CHANGE, and the numbers are what matter here.” What a moron. Brady gets acquitted on that statement alone. Mark it down…..and I still want those G*d D*mn draft picks back! Travesty.

I don’t understand why Brady’s refusal to turn over his phone is viewed as a major point of failure to cooperate on his part, while Gostkowski refusing to do the same is viewed in the report as a non-factor. I have yet to see anything at all written about this either. I don’t intend to bring Gostowski down into this quagmire, but it is yet another inconsistency. Brady refuses to provide his phone and it is a clear indication of culpability and is clearly a major factor in both the conclusion of the report and the punishment handed down. Gostkowski does the same and it warrants no mention at all. To me, the fact that both refused to do so indicates that the Union directed them not to, and for good reason.

For what it’s worth, Wells, the hired assassin, is now challenging Yee to “publish his notes” from the Brady interview and is claiming that he “found direct evidence” that Brady knew what was going on, etc. Of course, he found it unnecessary to put that “direct evidence” in his report, so that makes just a ton of sense. Looks like the NFL is pushing back a little after the Pats’ camps pushed back last night. And why wouldn’t they? They know the media is going to carry their water for them and dismiss anything the Pats say in their defense.

Patriots sources are steadfast—and their belief was conveyed to the league, according to a source—that Mike Kensil, the NFL’s VP of game operations, walked up to Patriots equipment manager Dave Schoenfeld on the sideline after halftime and said, “We weighed the balls. You are in big f—— trouble.” New England and Kraft thought this incident, and others, showed bias by the league and would be explored in the Wells report.

If they can somehow prove that, or provide compelling substantiated testimony… then I think we’re further down the road to an Al Davis lawsuit. It sounds like there’s no shortage of NFL owners/execs going off the record to say “Eff the Patriots” on this, which means that Kraft may not have much support among the other owners. If you take Kensil’s comment plus his ties to the Jets plus the Colts leaks plus this joke of an “independent” report plus the historically disproportionate penalty, you’re building up the beginnings of a pretty good case of concerted, deliberate action to harm the Patriots by the league itself.

If you’re the Colts, or the Jets, or even the Carolina Panthers, do you want to look down the barrel of FBI agents executing a Federal subpoena (it’s interstate commerce, so any case would be Federal in nature) forcing to turn over all communications with the league office and its personnel? No. So if you even THINK that Kraft can and will get to that point, you start taking steps now to make this go away.

So the likelihood of a suit is still probably low. But the likelihood of behind-the-scenes threats of a suit are, I think, pretty high. We’ll see. Git yer popcorn.

My thoughts exactly. Threaten them behind the scenes and make them fire Goodell, and then insist the new commissioner dismiss all current penalties, while accepting the minimum (per the rule) $25K fine for what can be described for public consumptions as “procedural deficiencies” vis a vis how low-level team personnel handled the footballs on that particular day. Oh, and I’d insist the new commissioner NOT be a former employee of ANY current NFL team — pluck some CEO from a North Dakota financial firm or something like that. Kraft MUST go nuclear over this and threaten to hit them where it hurts; the league certainly went nuclear, because the league knew the media would take its side and that it would have lots of support among the other 31.

If anybody missed F&M today, let me sum it up for you – Felger was all about YOU Patriots fans, YOUR owner, YOUR team, etc…..Mazz, that squeaky f***, is losing his mind over Belichick not getting in trouble. He’ll accept the Wells Report as it relates to Brady but not the part that says BB did nothing wrong. Well isn’t that convenient? And isn’t that 100% Tony Massarotti in a nutshell?

I’m so glad I stopped listening to this sh!tshow months ago. Sadly I still see them in my Facebook timeline with crap like this. It’s amazing they get the ratings they do because every 98.5 Facebook post involving them is just dripping with vitriol and hatred for both guys, 99% of the time.

At the time, Simpson was not an easy case at all. It looked to be a case of mitigating the sentence likely to be assessed, as there was just loads of evidence against him. In hindsight, though, yes — if the prosecution will aggressively screw up their own case time after time, and you’ve got a judge who lets you get away with whatever clown-car-level theatrics you want to put in front of the jury, then even I could have gotten him acquitted. (Which, by the way, is not a dig on Cochrane and Shapiro, who actually did a very good job.)

Because the local media instigators know he will come on the air and unequivocally trash the Patriots just to troll their fans. It’s to generate outrage. It’s about nothing else. The guy is a shameless self-promoter, not a journalist. I believe he’s even been caught stating this at one time or another. His journalism professors must be proud. Still waiting for someone, anyone, to ask him if it’s OK to pump in fake crowd noise for years, or to tank an entire NFL season, defrauding thousands of paying customers and affecting playoff races in the process, in order to be able to draft the next big franchise QB. Since this slimeball first appeared on the scene last January and starting crowing about the Pats’ lack of integrity and “honor,” no one has brought up the many, many examples of the Colts “dishonoring” the game. It’s time someone did it.

It’s times like this is when I’m glad we have a viable and sane alternative to Felger and Bitch. On D&H you had a good well rounded debate on deflategate mess. On Felger it was literally screaming about why BB isn’t being run out of the league for this. Instead of debating the facts of the case as it stands now;they wanted to just bitch and moan that BB is “skating” on this. That’s the way they run a show. Bring up scenerios that didn’t actually happen and get worked up into a frothy frenzie over it. Predictable trolling makes for bad radio. Boring. I don’t know why they are still number 1. do people know that WEEI has been on FM for awhile now?

Dale and Holley have been on point the last couple days. Jerry too. They DEBATE each other. They stay on topic and don’t manufacture sh!t and faux outrage. It’s so good to have them back. It’s also good to be back in the bosum of WEEI again. They only SH show I indulge is Zo and Beatle and that’s just Zo. I actually really miss Gresh.

The next original take from Adam Jones will be his first.
I suggest they rename his show the Felger & Mazz Wrap Up Show.
How boring it must be to pretend to be another guy and not be yourself.
He’s like a bad tribute band.

I was struck yesterday by how thin skinned Ted Wells came off. He did not like having his integrity questioned, yet he spent $5 mill of the NFL’s money to do that to Tom Brady and by extension the NE Patriots. Welcome to the big leagues, son. F&M spent time saying the smear campaign of Wells is orchestrated by the Pats because it is “what they do”. It amazes me how Felger and Mazz have gotten this story so wrong. Maybe they are doing it for ratings and all of this is an act. Who knows. Getting back to Wells…if he did not want his credibility questioned perhaps he should have done the following:

– When he says there is direct incontrovertible proof of Brady being in on the criminal conspiracy to deflate the footballs…as he did at the press conference yesterday…he claimed the evidence in the report is enough to meet the Preponderance of a Doubt standard….my suggestion is he either learn what Preponderance means or present actual evidence. A layman like me can see he showed no direct or even circumstantial evidence that showed Brady was behind a conspiracy. All he did was proved Brady likes the footballs set to 12.5 PSI.

– What he should have done is investigated why Walt Anderson was so sloppy with his readings. Why nothing was written down. How were the gauges calibrated. If they were not at least question why the same gauge was not used for all readings. He should have asked why only 4 of the Colts balls were measured at half time. Being the anal retentive he is he could have asked why the half time measurements did not alternate 1 Pats ball 1 Colts ball until all 24 were measured. Why alternate…that way the balls would return to equilibrium at the same pace and one team would not have an advantage over the other. No wait Wells does not believe in the Ideal Gas Law or Science for that matter.

– He should have investigated why the Pats balls were filled to 16PSI by the refs in the Jets game. He should have questioned the NFL’s policies and procedures.

– He should have looked more closely at Mike Kensil.

– He should have looked at comments Aaron Rogers made about over inflating balls. Not to get Rogers in trouble, but to look at how NFL QB’s in general instruct equipment guys to prepare balls.

– Most importantly he should not have spent $5 mill and 100 days to do something that should have been handled in a week.

Wells when he was writing up the report, if he is as smart as he pretends to be, should have understood that it would be parsed word for word. He should have understood that taking on the Patriots over something trivial is very different than taking on the Saints over something pretty serious. Most importantly, if he did not want his credibility questioned he should have done his job and fully investigated the issue rather than presenting the NFL with the slanted report they wanted.

I can’t believe you did not wade through a tome I wrote…I would be insulted but it was tl/dpr (didn’t proof read).

I am seriously starting to wonder how this guy argued cases in front of the Supreme Court. Perhaps this is one of those cases where someone who is really good at one thing (Arguing appellate cases) finds out that those skills don’t translate to something else…doing investigations of the mundane. I have met many arrogant successful people who think because they succeed at one thing (Being an successful athlete) they will succeed at another (own a restaurant). Wells seems to suck at independent investigations. We all can’t be great at everything. Wells’ problem is he does not seem to acknowledge his lack of prowess. He seems so intent on defending his reputation that he misses the fact that a little humility would have gone a long way towards deflecting that criticism.

I mentioned a small list before of people doing actual investigation. Florio, at first, was being fed by Kensil’s son, but it appears as the past few weeks have changed his thinking. He’s been tearing apart the Wells’ Report on PFT and this is another last night:

Unreal. He, Sharpe and, years ago, Schlereth, completely dismiss that little tidbit about their team’s success in the late 1990s, like it never happened or like it doesn’t matter. Yes boys, playing with an illegal roster for two Super Bowl-winning seasons does kinda matter….a lot. It means everyone else was playing with legal rosters, and your team wasn’t. In other words: not a level playing field. Oh, and Elway personally showed great integrity by holding the entire NFL draft hostage in 1983 because he was throwing a hissy fit about having to play for the Colts. People in glass houses….

LOL…I love the sub-header on the screen shot: “New low for commentary in this city?, and the “new low,” according to the DB and YARM, is that many people are calling this OBVIOUSLY BIASED report what it is: an obviously biased hatchet job against the Pats (with, admittedly, a few interesting tidbits that could, maybe, possibly be construed by some as “incriminating”). I’m telling ya, someone IS going to pop that DB in the mouth one of these days, and I will not feel the least bit sorry for him. That schtick of his has an expiration date, and I believe it’s coming due for a lot of people, even for some of his devoted followers.

hey – ordway fell with a delicious thud and i suppose even felger cannot be ever immune – but at this point those predicting the downfall are beginning to sound like borges with his annual declaration of the death of the dynasty

Oh, believe me, I’m not predicting Felger’s downfall. There is so much negativity out there in this town (h/t Rick Pitino), that Felger’s approach may very well have a long shelf-life. That said, his constant Patriots bashing has to be wearing thin for a lot of people at this point…perhaps that will encourage some of them to tune him out a little more frequently than they do now. One can hope anyway.

Possibly Kraft himself? I know he really pushes Jonathan’s buttons when he’s on with them. If they don’t outright tell The Sports Hub to pound sand and go to ‘EEI or somewhere else I could see them really restricting access with team functions and player access etc. Radio partner or not, the Krafts will only take so much of Felger’s sh!t.

Unless this has happened behind the scenes, I’ll give the Krafts credit for not trying to control the media in town. I know it’s “quite common” now for teams to NESN-ize their coverage, or downright buy the outlets who cover them and completely sanitize it, but how is that good for anyone? It’s one thing to question or be critical but when you’re searching for something like the original thread showed, it’s.. irresponsible.

Felger is off the hinge right now. He’s screaming about someone or more carrying the water for the patriots. Said its getting him down now and he can’t take it anymore. Tony and Murray are asking him who he’s talking about and he wouldn’t be specific. I have to wonder if it’s dale&holley with Thornton that he’s bitching about. Sounds like it to me. And is there inside info of maybe that d&h are finally making inroads into their ratings? If they weren’t a threat then he wouldn’t be so despondent. Something’s up. Is he actually surprised that local fans don’t want to hear a Packers stock holder crap all over their football team 4 hours everyday? Douchebag.

In Felger’s world, being fair = carrying water for them. Remember, this is the guy who refers to Mike Reiss as Kraft’s “fifth son” because Reiss takes his job as a reporter, which is to be balanced, quite seriously. I’m sure Felger enjoys his cushy, comfortable, upper-middle-class life, which has been bought and paid for by his selling out to the dark side of “journalism” over the past few years. The question is whether or not he can look himself in the mirror every day.

Isn’t this what he does though? Takes the temperature of the room and goes 180* in the opposite direction? 72 hours ago he was thinking the bare minimum for a punishment and attacking the Wells Report. Now he’s raging against Zolak, Portnoy, Thornton, Callahan, Beatle, Gresh, and everybody else. He probably has the Mad Dog screaming rant on a loop on his ipod.

Felger may have been topped today in the insanity department. Tomase was on Breaking Balls w/ Minihane and my god…..he believes EVERY WORD of the Wells Report. In his mind the Patriots are 1000% guilt of everything and Wells is the cock of the walk and the report itself is the final gospel. Every time Kirk brought up a hole or a flaw Tomase responded with “Yeah, I keep hearing that, but….”

Forget Felger. Tomase makes Bob Kravitz and Gregg Doyle seem like they’re on The Wall with Thornton and Portnoy. It was…wow.

Minihane wants the dude who left his kid in the car then called the cops to have his child taken. That’s what I gathered in between commercials on Toucher and Rich this morning. That and Gary Tanguay’s employment and being out on the air continues to baffle me. He’s terrible.

To be fair to Tanguay, he acknowledged that he only has a job in radio because of his voice. He is puzzled why people “stereotype” him as being an “empty suit”, “arrogant”, or “not smart”. To be fair to the rest of us who are in the listening audience, the fact that he does not understand why we label him as we do proves how utterly stupid he is.